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Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman investigate murder in Stalinist Russia: It should be more interesting than it is |
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Cast: Tom Hardy (Leo Demidov), Noomi Rapace (Raisa Demidova),
Joel Kinnaman (Vasili Nikitin), Gary Oldman (General Nesterov), Vincent Cassel
(Major Kuzmin), Jason Clarke (Anatoly Brodsky), Paddy Considine (Vladimir
Malevich), Fares Fares (Alexei Andreyev), Charles Dance (Major Grachev), Tara
Fitzgerald (Inessa Nesterova)
Adaptations of bestselling books are tricky things. Your
source material already has a pre-existing fan base but you also need to bring
new faces into the multiplex. Is that easy to do? Not always – and many films
fail to strike a balance between telling the story for newcomers and satisfying
the old fans. This is one of those failures.
Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy) is a war hero and NKVD officer in
1950s Stalinist Russia. Initially complacent and sure that he is a good man
doing his best in the system, his life is shattered after his wife Raisa (Noomi
Rapace) – a woman who secretly hates her husband – is maliciously reported as a
traitor, and Leo refuses denounce her. Banished to the outbacks of Russia, Leo
feels compelled to find some redemption by investigating a child murderer. But Stalin
has ruled murder is a capitalist crime “impossible” in the paradise of
Communist Russia, making it a crime the all-powerful state has decreed cannot
exist.
It’s hard to put your finger exactly on why this film never comes
to life. It ticks nearly all the boxes of the original book’s plot (it in fact
changes the one part of the book I found a “shark jump”, the identify of the
killer itself). It’s well shot. There are some very good actors in it. It’s a
good story. But it just doesn’t work – you never really invest in it. Perhaps
the problem is the film has to jettison the interior monologues of the
characters, so we lose much of the context of the action.
The book’s strength was its exploration of the nature of
investigating crime in Stalin’s Russia: where crimes only exist if the state
agrees they can, where investigation is largely unnecessary as the perpetrator is
always proclaimed at the start, where those investigating the crimes are
constantly in fear of being denounced for failures (“if the man I follow
escapes, I will be accused of working with him”). The film fails to get this Stalinist
tension across, so is left with just the bare workings of the plot without the
novel’s context, making it seem like a “murder of the week” TV movie.
The attempt to get all the plot ticked means many actors get
wasted in heavily reduced parts. A particular victim is Gary Oldman, who can’t
be on screen for more than 15 minutes, and switches from obstructive boss to
confidante as the plot requires. For the leads, Hardy and Rapace give quality
performances (Rapace in particular is very good), and I did like the way the
film really explored how Raisa’s feelings for Leo change from disgust and fear
towards true affection. But you never really feel or care for them as you
should.
However, they, along with the rest of the cast, suffer from
the decision to give all the actors thick Roosian
acksents. Why was this decided? Not only does this make some lines hard to
hear (particularly Hardy’s) and stifles variance in delivery, but there is no
need for it. Every character is Russian. They are all talking Russian. It’s all
set in Russia. Why not have them use non-strongly accented versions of their
own voices? Do we really need thick Slavic vowels to remind us we are in Russia?
Child 44 is a
disappointing film, and perhaps the worst thing about it is, if you watch it
before reading the book, you’ll probably wonder what all the fuss was about. By
largely failing to get across the full complexity, danger and madness of the Stalinist
system, it reduces the book’s plot into something flimsy and everyday. The
whole adaptation has almost completely missed the point of what made the book
so different and compelling in the first place. By doing so it turns the story
into something that feels much more derivative than it actually was.
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